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Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

Hello. First off, great looking tool. Love it.. just need to get a better understanding of it, so here's my case.
I'm not sure how to proceed with the tool, so I'm asking what I need to do next.

I have managed to mess up 2 drives, but will keep the focus of this post to one drive only (/dev/sdb)

There are 2 partitions that I wish to recover - 1 NTFS Windows partition [goodwin, approx 100 MB], and one NTFS data partition [BIG_data, approx 1061 MB]. There are also a number of deleted partitions. BIG_data was within an extended partition, but I'm only worried about recovering it if possible.

Analyse Output:
What I think I see:
1. What does the 65271 under start indicate? starting sector #?
2. #3 P Linux starts on 78530 (right after [goodwin] ends. Not worried about recoving this partition, but curious as to why there are 2 listings for the same partition.
3. #2 Extended LBA and #5 [BIG_data] both end at the same spot, and the NTFS partition starts a little bit after the extended one. i think this is to be expected and is good.
4. [goodwin] and [BIG_data] are both recognized, so that's gotta be good.Current partition structure:
Partition Start End Size in sectors

Quick Search Output:
What I think I see.
1. An NTFS and four Linux partitions that I don't care about recovering.
2. No seperate line for the extended partition
3. an unexplained NTFS partition between [goodwin] and [bigdata]

Deeper Search Output:
What I think I see:
1. Holy crap.. there's a whole lot more output here.
2. FAT32 [EMPTYE] ?? No idea what that is
3. A group of 3 NTFS partitions where [goodwin] starts, 2 of which have the partition name, one of these with an *
I expect that the first [goodwin] entry with the * is suspected to be the correct one.
4. 'Linux' entries all over the place. Not worried about recovering any of them. Are they from previous partitions that may have been created and then overwritten?
5. No indication of Extended partition. Not worried about that.
6. [BIG_data] is listed, but has lots of Linux entries in it's space.

As the 2 partitions you want to recover are already listed in the current partition table, there is no need to search for the partitions. Go in the Advanced menu and try to list the content of each NTFS partition.

cgrenier wrote:As the 2 partitions you want to recover are already listed in the current partition table, there is no need to search for the partitions. Go in the Advanced menu and try to list the content of each NTFS partition.

Thanks so much for taking the time to reply.

I was actually able to recover the partition on this disk (Partition Outside of Disk error) as well as the issues on my other disk that I hadn't posted yet (Overlapping partitions) with some help from http://gparted.org/h2-fix-msdos-pt.php.

I am however quite impressed with the testdisk tool, community and help forums here. Great work everybody. I am going to take some unimportant disks and start messing them up so that I can learn how testdisk really works- that way when the day comes again that I need it, this will be time well spent.